Yakima Fresh Hop Ale Festival recap

What do you get when you combine 50 breweries, fresh hop craft beers and 6,000 people in downtown Yakima? You get the mayhem that is the Fresh Hop Ale Festival. It has come a long way since Elizabeth Herres Miller launched the festival in 2003. What use to be a fundraiser for the now-defunct Allied Arts of Yakima arts nonprofit is one of the hottest tickets in the Pacific Northwest craft beer industry. Its footprint has extended beyond the original half-block next to Millennium Plaza to include the entire block-wide parking lot adjacent to the plaza. Fun, hop-wearing people drank all the freshest fresh hop beers, such as Bale Breaker’s Piled High Imperial Hop Ale, Beer Valley’s Brewing Leafer Madness, Cloudburst/Holy Mountain Wetwired, Fat Head’s Fresh Hop Four Hundo (Amarillo), River City Brewing’s Funkadelicious Fresh Hop Ale, Skookum’s Skookum If You Got ‘Em and hundreds more.